The new field of "knowledge management" (KM) is receiving increasing recognition as the gains to be realized from the systematic effort to store and export vast knowledge resources held by employees of an organization are being recognized. The sharing of knowledge broadly within an organization offers numerous potential benefits to an organization through the awareness and reuse of existing knowledge, and the avoidance of duplicate efforts.
In order to maximize the exploitation of knowledge resources within an organization, a knowledge management system may be presented with two primary challenges, namely (1) the identification of knowledge resources within the organization and (2) the distribution and accessing of information regarding such knowledge resources within the organization.
The identification, capture, organization and storage of knowledge resources is a particularly taxing problem. Prior art knowledge management systems have typically implemented knowledge repositories that require users manually to input information frequently into pre-defined fields, and in this way manually and in a prompted manner to reveal their personal knowledge base. However, this approach suffers from a number of drawbacks in that the manual entering of such information is time consuming and often incomplete, and therefore places a burden on users who then experience the inconvenience and cost of a corporate knowledge management initiative long before any direct benefit is experienced. Furthermore, users may not be motivated to describe their own knowledge and to contribute documents on an ongoing basis that would subsequently be re-used by others without their awareness or consent. The manual input of such information places a burden on users who then experience the inconvenience and cost of a corporate knowledge management initiative long before any direct benefit is experienced.
It has been the experience of many corporations that knowledge management systems, after some initial success, may fail because either compliance (i.e., the thoroughness and continuity with which each user contributes knowledge) or participation (i.e., the percentage of users actively contributing to the knowledge management system) falls to inadequate levels. Without high compliance and participation, it becomes a practical impossibility to maintain a sufficiently current and complete inventory of the knowledge of all users. Under these circumstances, the knowledge management effort may never offer an attractive relationship of benefits to costs for the organization as a whole, reach a critical mass, and the original benefit of knowledge management falls apart or is marginalized to a small group.
In order to address the problems associated with the manual input of knowledge information, more sophisticated prior art knowledge management initiatives may presume the existence of a centralized staff to work with users to capture knowledge bases. This may however increase the ongoing cost of knowledge management and requires a larger up-front investment before any visible payoff, thus deterring the initial funding of many an otherwise promising knowledge management initiatives. Even if an initial decision is made to proceed with such a sophisticated knowledge management initiative, the cash expenses associated with a large centralized knowledge capture staff may be liable to come under attack, given the difficulty of quantifying knowledge management benefits in dollar terms.
As alluded to above, even once a satisfactory knowledge management information base has been established, the practical utilization thereof to achieve maximum potential benefit may be challenging. Specifically, ensuring that the captured information is readily organized, available, and accessible as appropriate throughout the organization may be problematic.